More Scenes from the Rural Life by Verlyn Klinkenborg

Author:Verlyn Klinkenborg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press
Published: 2013-03-14T04:00:00+00:00

May 18

I’m writing from a mile high in a small Wyoming town on the edge of the Wind River range. The snow on the nearby buttes has finally melted, and the creek-bottoms and pastures and hayground are an unhoped-for green. The drift of cotton from the cottonwoods is almost over, but the lilacs are still in high bloom. The town is nearly damp with their scent. It’s two scents really, a floral dissonance, a sweet astringency. There’s a dark, grating baritone of sorts, which is veiled by a lighter, more liquid perfume, a second soprano I suppose. I find myself wondering how a scent so strangely unsettled can also feel so homely.

We’re driving across country, heading home from Southern California. It didn’t occur to me until this drive how segregated the botanical scents of Southern California really are. You come upon them in pockets—a planting of this, a gathering of that, upwellings of sage and jasmine and orange blossom and rosemary. But half a block down the street the fragrance has faded or been overlaid, or it’s simply surrendered to the ozone. By late afternoon our first day on the road, we were a little short of Cedar City, Utah. We stopped to switch drivers, and when I stepped out of the truck the breeze was suddenly full of the fragrance of unhardened grasses, an entire landscape of gramineous scent. The desert was long behind us—the Joshua trees and flowering yucca—and so was everything that Southern California calls to mind. But it took that smell on the wind to make me know it.

We had to climb higher still before we came upon the lilacs. We caught up to them in Coalville, Utah, up near the southwest corner of Wyoming. They were growing in every yard along the gravel street on the edge of town, just as they do in the town I’m writing from. By the time we get home the lilacs will have long since gone by. When we first bought our small farm, now nearly ten years ago, I spent part of one summer trying to grub them out. They seemed so ordinary, so deeply familiar. It says almost enough about where I was raised to say that I was raised among lilacs.

Here, in the scent of them, I can smell the spareness of a cold climate, the beautiful austerity of a short growing season. In its own way, a lilac is as pushing, as immodest as anything that grows in Southern California. Just ask the person who has tried to grub one out. But when I smell lilacs, I see a nearly bare yard in a small town and children playing in the weight of their scent not knowing what it will come to mean to them in time.

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